Historically all kinds of things have served the role of money. In recent examples, prison environments consistently give rise to people using "commodities" like ramen packs or cigarettes as a unit of money.
The reason why gold has been the choice over most of human kind's history is that it has properties that make it suitable for money. It's scarce. It's difficult to make more of it. It's difficult to fake (until recently). It's easy to "hold". It's durable. But above all, it has a history of social consensus that it is the asset that is globally agreed upon to serve this purpose.
If you think prisoners ascribe value to ramen packs as money because of their ability to eat it, you have a fundamental misunderstanding how money works and how moneyness gets assigned to physical objects.
It's difficult to understand what an introduction of a new type of money looks like, because most people haven't experienced that in their lifetime. That's ok. But as a crowd of people here of who frequently espouse first-principles thinking, it's unfortunate to see people repeatedly falling for the "it has industrial uses" argument for gold. Yes industrial use creates a demand floor and a price floor. But if you think most of the price of gold is driven by it's industrial use then I have a bridge to sell you.